Chapter 27
Team Work: Going on Field Trips
In This Chapter
Knowing why field trips benefit your students
Seeing how to build students’ interest for the trip
Getting ideas for trips at home and abroad for all levels of student
Building three days’ worth of lessons around one outing, and homework too
Hopefully, you’re fortunate enough to work for a school that allows and encourages field trips for students. Taking students out of the classroom brings a wide range of advantages. However, you need good preparation and planning to ensure that the students get some real benefit out of the visit.
In this chapter, I show you how to get the best out of field trips, and avoid the pitfalls, so that they have real educational value. I show how to use trips to build some strong lessons, and then offer a pre-intermediate lesson plan spanning three sessions.
Using Field Trips for EFL Lessons
A field is when you take the students outside the school to experience learning in a natural setting. So for us TEFL teachers, it means taking the students to a location, in any country, where English is the language of communication. When you mention going out on a trip to your students their first thought might be, ‘Hooray! We’re going to have some fun.’ That’s not unreasonable. After all, who doesn’t like to enjoy themselves? And field trips should, indeed, be fun – students having fun learn better. But as the teacher you need to put most of the emphasis on the pedagogic value of the visit.
With that in mind, consider some great reasons to take your students out:
- Authenticity: Often after teaching a particular point of grammar in the classroom students ask, ‘But do people actually say that?’ Taking them out into the real world provides opportunities to see how people use language in authentic settings. At the same time, they pick up new words or phrases in real context.
- Control: Well-prepared visits facilitate controlled interactions because students know where they’re going, what they need to say, and the nature of the responses they’ll get.
- Culture: Trips away provide students the opportunity to learn about traditions, customs, and heritage, which inevitably influence language itself.
- Immediacy: You can help learners make sense of everyday experiences in English right there on the spot. The outside world of the English language speakers becomes more accessible as a consequence.
- Life skills: You can help students build skills in the outside world, such as using public transport in a foreign country.
- Linking the outside world and the classroom: The classroom is a comfort zone for students, yet the reality is that they’re learning English to handle aspects of life in the outside world. When you bring the two worlds together students are reminded of their purpose and spurred on to more progress.
- Material: A trip isn’t just a self-contained event. In the preparation stage you can inspire discussion and vocabulary input. Likewise after the visit you can use the trip for analysis, project work, essays, and so on.
- Variety: Even the best of activities can seem tedious if done relentlessly. Diversifying learning activities keeps students enthusiastic about their studies. New challenges also provide new perspectives on why particular learning strategies are important.
You may find that some students are rather reluctant to go out and about. Likely they haven’t thought about the positive aspects I outline in the preceding bullet points and so don’t think that trips are a useful part of the course. You need to highlight the benefits from the outset.
Some students may have particular concerns that you need to address. A private conversation with a reluctant student helps you get to the bottom of the situation. The concern may relate to
- Accessibility: Check on access for students with mobility difficulties.
- Convenience: Remember that some learners are already hard pushed to attend lessons, alongside work and other commitments so energy levels may vary considerably. If you float the idea early on, the students can raise concerns, which helps you plan.
- Cost: Those on a tight budget may not have the fare to and from the location, or the entrance fee to a place of interest. I find that if you discuss the idea of going on trips with the class well in advance of preparing a specific event, you can gauge where to take them (free event, local challenge, and so on).
- Social anxiety: Some students are very shy and would scarcely talk to a stranger in their own language, let alone undertake a conversation in another language in an unfamiliar setting. So if you’re setting a task that involves asking for information, you may need to provide the reassurance of group work. Mix the personalities and roles so perhaps the shy types can do the note-taking while the more extrovert types speak.
You can use this lesson plan in many ways. Ideally, you spread the ideas here over three sessions:
- Prepare for the visit.
- Enjoy the day out.
- Follow up with class discussion.
I’ve written this plan mainly for students who are already in an English-speaking country or are planning a visit to one.
Using one lesson to set up further work gives the class a sense of continuity, which builds anticipation for the next lesson.
Lesson overview
Session One: Preparing
In the first session you build up anticipation for the trip and help students prepare language that is useful for travelling there and also recording information while there.
Doing a warmer activity
6 minutes
In pairs the students tell each other about three places of interest in their hometown that they’d recommend to tourists. Have a class feedback session in which the students tell you which places sound the most interesting.
If all your students are from the same place, get them to draft a short list of the five best places to visit. Together they can compare their lists and try to reach an agreement.
Planning the journey
3 minutes
Show pictures of places of interest the class may be able to visit. Either get them to choose one or tell them which one you’ve decided upon, and why. Find out what they know about the place.
10 minutes
The next step is to plan the route. Make sure that all the students can see a map of the area covering the route from the school to their place of interest. It may be a road map or a local transport map. In small groups, ask students to note down the route from the school to the location. Start them off by noting the first couple of places on the board; for example, train stations, bus stops, or villages that they’ll probably go through.
A representative of one group then shows the route on the board as a list. Ask whether the other students agree or not. Some may choose to come up to the board and adjust the route.
5 minutes
At this point you should have a list of place names from the route. Drill the names of these places, highlighting pronunciation features such as the use of the schwa, which is /ə/ on the phonemic chart, in typical endings. I write about the schwa in Teaching English as Foreign Language For Dummies in Chapter 12. You usually find a smattering of syllables like these in English language place names:
|
–ford |
/fəd/ |
|
–bury |
/brɪ/ |
|
–shire |
/ʃə/ |
|
–wich |
/ɪdʒ/ or /ɪtʃ/ |
|
–burgh/borough |
/brə/ |
|
–ham |
/əm/ or /həm/ |
The advantage of teaching the pronunciation of place names is that students have something to focus on en route to the place of interest. For example, they can listen to the announcements on public transport, which will confirm the pronunciation previously drilled in class. They can also pick off the various places mentioned on the map as they travel along the route.
If there happen to be no interesting place names to work on, instruct your students to write down some directions to the location instead.
Considering the place
10 minutes
Together pairs of students write down eight to ten things they’d like to find out about while visiting the chosen destination. For example, students visiting Tate Modern in London may ask:
- What time does it close?
- Can I take photographs there?
- Which is the most expensive painting?
- Is it similar to a place in my country?
Start students off with an example or two on the board.
Writing questions in English is always tricky for students, especially at lower levels. In particular you need to remind them about using the auxiliary verb as well as the main verb in the infinitive form (unless the main verb is ‘to be’). So, not ‘What you see in this gallery?’ but ‘What can you see in this gallery?’
Monitor the progress of each group for accuracy and content.
10 minutes
Now take one person from each of the previous pairs to form new groups. In this way they can compare their ideas.
Ask one student to read out all of his questions to the whole class. Other students note down good questions they don’t have. The other studentsrs can read out any individual question they think is particularly good. The class can note these too. As a result, all the students should have interesting questions to work with.
While the students are at the place of interest they must find the answers to as many of these questions as possible. This task stops them from just wandering around, messing about, or missing the point of the visit.
10 minutes
The next challenge is to find out what the visitors to this place of interest think about it. Many students have a camera phone or voice recorder they can use for this purpose. Students will use their gadgets to interview other tourists and get their opinions on what they liked or disliked about their visit.
Make sure students know how to speak politely when interviewing others. Go over a little script like this, putting it on the board:
- Excuse me, please. We are studying English. We would like to ask you two questions and record your answers. Is that okay?
- What did you like most about this place? What did you not like?
- Thank you very much.
Elicit from the students the reasons why recording the answers is useful: namely, that understanding everything that people say at the time may be difficult and that it will be interesting to listen to the responses in class and get the help of the other students as well as the teacher in understanding the comments.
Pick two or three pairs of students to perform a role-play for the class. So some students act as tourists and the other students interview them using the script on the board. It’s a good idea to practise recording the ‘tourists’ answers too to iron out any technical issues.
Organising homework
6 minutes
Make sure that the students understand the meaning of each part of the report and that they know what kind of information to write there. They can use the template as a framework for note taking while on the trip.
Session two: Going on the trip
When you go off on the trip, take the route map and remind the students of the place names. Elicit the pronunciation from them and get them to follow the route on the map as you go.
At the place of interest, move around among the various groups and help them to complete their questions.
Look after any shy students and, if necessary, introduce them personally to tourists to make it easier for your students to interview them.
Session three: Feeding back to the class
This session gives the class the opportunity to review the trip and go over the data they recorded.
Doing a warmer
5 minutes
Ask students some general knowledge questions about the place you visited. Put students into teams and make the activity into a quiz. Keep score on the board and see which team is victorious.
Reporting Back
10 minutes
Now ask students to take out the notes they made during the trip. They must compare the answers to the eight to ten questions they decided upon in session one. Then check as a class, that all the students know the answers.
15 minutes
Ask students to share their recordings with the class. After playing them aloud, see whether the class can transcribe what the tourists said. Help them where necessary.
5 minutes
Set the students homework to write a report based on the notes they made in your template (see Figure 27-1). Give them plenty of time to complete and hand in homework.
Figure 27-1: A template for writing a report as homework.
Extension activities
Get students to research other places to visit and make suggestions to the class by writing their ideas on the weekly plan (I mention this in Chapter 3).
How about breakfast out? A colleague of mine, Steve, arranges outings to a traditional café for a full English (and usually manages to get his own meal on the house, in view of all the custom he brings in!). It’s great for food and menu lexis as well as British customs.
Finally, following the drilling of place names, have a session on pronouncing typical surnames such as Smith, Robinson and Jones. You could highlight the ‘th’ sounds, and pronunciation of vowel sounds.